Ornamental shrub

Usage examples of lilac.

The Hemp Agrimony grows with us in moist, shady places, with a tall reddish stem, and with terminal crowded heads of dull lilac flowers.

Quietly, Asey circled around the barn, glided along the shadow of a thick lilac hedge toward the rear of the house, and finally came to a stop just a few feet away from the back door.

The sun still dappled through the branches of the huge old poplars the way it always had, and the hedges of caragana and lilac and cotoneaster were just as familiar.

Similarly, the now purple bruises left on her breastflesh by Duke were somehow complemented by the cupless lilac basque that was hooked tightly beneath them.

They sailed under clipped green, fresh-watered trees, through flowered lanes, past daffodil, lilac, violet, rose, and peppermint-coloured houses on the dustless road.

The mingled scents of hyacinths, narcissus, freesia, imported mimosa, and lilac filled the air, diminishing the peculiar musty smell of mildew and dust and old wood that was so prevalent in the church.

The Three Mulla-Mulgars and The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and The Book of Three, Elidor and The Moon of Gomrath, Five Children and It, and Half Magic and Over Sea, Under Stone -- the kind of book that could distill an entire summer into a few hundred pages, the kind of book that can still summon up memories of hammocks and peach ice cream and the scent of lilacs, even if you actually first read them in a damp attic room smelling of wet sheetrock and ant traps.

She always chose soft, rather feminine outfits, arid this morning she wore a simple lilac wool suit and a matching blouse with a frilly jabot which fell down the front, gold jewelry, and black patent pumps and handbag.

Maurice said it was too cold to be outside, the dude in his lilac do-rag and tailored black pea jacket, enough shoulders in the coat for White Boy Bob-White Boy wearing a wool shirt hanging out over his T-shirt-coming behind them up the ramp to the front door of the Kronk Recreation Center at McGraw and Junction, a two-story red-brick building that looked to Glenn like a public library no one used in a poor section of town.

Even ahorse, the Lady Nym looked graceful, dressed all in shimmering lilac robes and a great silk cape of cream and copper that lifted at every gust of wind, and made her look as if she might take flight.

After relieving Josef of the burden of his innocence the previous night, in a procedure that required less time than it now took her to brew a pot of coffee, Trudi had pulled on her cherry-pink kimono and gone out to the parlor to study a text on phlebotomy, leaving Josef to the warmth of her goose-down counterpane, the lilac smell of her nape and cheek lingering on the cool pillow, the perfumed darkness of her bedroom, the shame of his contentment.

And thus it came to pass that in the dusk of a November evening the Russian boy, murmuring a few of the prayers of his Church for luck, gave hasty but decent burial to a large polecat under the lilac trees at Hoopington.

I think of a semi-formal arrangement of rhodies and azaleas, lilacs and viburnum, with a potentilla perhaps, or a butterfly bush for late summer color.

Luke leapt to his feet as two figures in lilac one-piece suits sprang from beneath the drooping leafy strands of a rimu tree.

When later I went to boarding school and the schoolroom became my bedroom I had my bed by the east window, and could watch the sun come up over the horizon and paint a huge skyscape of clouds lilac and saffron and crimson and rose.